The pattern was set in the 1930s and ’40s by Edward G. Robinson (“Little Caesar”), James Cagney, George Raft, Humphrey Bogart and Paul Muni — all small men who usually played tough and cruel. Sometimes camera angles obscured the physical facts — Robinson looked absolutely huge as Wolf Larsen in “The Sea Wolf” in what can be called, without irony, a towering performance — and sometimes the camera just didn’t care as when, for example, Cagney regularly beat up men obviously twice his size.

Slightly later came John Garfield, and the smallest of them all, Alan Ladd who played big in “The Blue Dahlia,” “The Glass Key,” “The Badlanders” and who more than holds his own against Ben Johnson and a tree-like Van Heflin in “Shane.”...

Famously slight Paul Newman displayed his chest and pugilistic abilities in movies like “Somebody Up There Likes Me,” “Hud,” “The Long, Hot Summer” and “Cool Hand Luke.” James Dean would have made the list had he lived longer. Now aging tough guy-short guys (by short I mean under 5-foot-9) include Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, Robert DeNiro, Harvey Keitel, Al Pacino, Mel Gibson, Jean Claude Van Damme and Sylvester Stallone, who created not one but two iconic American males, Rocky and Rambo.

And these days we have a bumper crop of undersized super heroes — Tom Cruise, Tobey Maguire, Mark Wahlberg and Robert Downey Jr., along with the occasionally macho Johnny Depp and Sean Penn.

Is there something comparable for women? Maybe we could make a list of women who have fairly average looks who play beautiful women on screen. My favorite example of this is Bette Davis in "Mr. Skeffington," where the raving over Bette's beauty occasionally crosses the line into the laughable. No man could resist her:

Ah, yes! I remember laughing out loud in the theater when she comes down the stairs and a man exclaims "Fanny! You look beautiful!" And check out that death-bed dialogue: "A woman is beautiful only when she is loved." That's what the plain women in the audience — next to the hubbies they dragged to the chick flick — long to believe.

56 comments:

Ann it works the opposite way for women. Gorgeous actresses play average looking women. The female part in Frankie and Johnny was played by Kathy Bates on Broadway but Michelle Piffer in the movies. Yeah, the best someone like Piffer could do was an ex con short order cook. Charlize Theron played the serial killer in Monster. Renee Zelweger played Bridget Jones. Minnie Driver as the fat girl in Circle of Friends. The list goes on and on. Women can only be reduced in stature by the movies.

Maybe by Hollywood standards they are not As. But by any ordinary standards they are beautiful. No way would either of them have problems attracting men if they lived in the real world versus Hollywood. And if you ever see Theron without makeup, she has really lousy skin and isn't as beautiful as she appears.

To be fair, Theron really did look like sh*t in Monster - and she is normally model gorgeous. I do agree that Hollywood's policy of having almost exclusively beautiful actresses makes the "poor girl who cannot find a boy" storylines a bit tough to swallow.

Sarah Jessica Parker is not pretty. When Garnier chose her as their "face", I thought that was odd. Then I saw her in The Family Stone. When she talks and laughs and smiles, she is more beautiful. Maybe I wouldn't have thought so if she had played an unlikeable character.

We see this all the time in our daily lives, don't we? The better you know and like someone, the more we see past the flaws.

What movie should I see that would change my opinion of Bette Davis? I've never thought she was beautiful.

Part of the original column seems to be based on the whole "short man syndrome" idea, which seems to obsess tall men. Keep in mind Cagney, Muni, and Edward G. were all first class actors, so that's not really illustrative. Short men are placed with other short men in the movies, so height as an issue isn't that apparent.

My brothers-in-law always give me a hard time about my height and can't get over the fact that it barely registers with me. Maybe tall men are intimidated by short guys. A lot of short guys do OK - Bonaparte, Caesar, Stalin, etc. Of course, retirement can be rough.

As for who is beautiful, remember, in the movies, makeup is everything. A lot of these broads wouldn't look that great on the street without all the paint.

John said...

Ann it works the opposite way for women. Gorgeous actresses play average looking women. The female part in Frankie and Johnny was played by Kathy Bates on Broadway but Michelle Piffer in the movies. Yeah, the best someone like Piffer could do was an ex con short order cook. ... Minnie Driver as the fat girl in Circle of Friends.

Minnie wasn't fat in Circle. She was built - there are a couple of scenes where the costumers are heroically trying to conceal the fact she is most generously endowed.

Bullies are more apt to be middleweights than heavyweights. Bitchy women are more likely to be a notch or two below beautiful. (Ugly women have nice personalities. Light weight men have affable personalities.)

Lately, my wife and I have been addicted to British TV detective movies. One of the things that really makes them different from the Hollywood detectives, TV or movie, is that almost all the characters, even the stars, look and act like real people so that you believe the story.

When you look at almost any American product you cannot help thinking that the person on the screen is an actor because their bodies are too toned, their teeth are too bright and too straight, their haricuts are perfect, and their clothes fit just right.

It's harder to fake beauty than size. Standing on a box won't make an average looking woman prettier.

As far as the little tough guys go, every man knows that the guys on that list aren't tough guys except for Van Damme. Sometimes I smirk a little watching those movies, especially Tom Cruise movies, when I think how three fourths of the guys on my son's high school football team would clean the floor with them. But, hey, most of them are good actors.

The first time I realized how Hollywood made small people look big on the screen was almost 40 years ago, when Katherine Ross walked into a clothing boutique in Denver where a roommate of mine worked. She was amazed at how tiny Ross was, maybe 5 foot or so. Then, you see her with Newman and Redford in Butch Cassidy, and they all look normal sized. If I didn't know better, I would have expected Redford to be six foot or so.

Then, Ross went and married Sam Elliot, who has to be a foot taller than she.

The other one I chuckled at was Cruise in Top Gun. Apparently, he needed to sit on a box to be visible outside the F-14 he was sitting in. And, around that time, I shared an office with an A-6 pilot, not much over 6 foot, who ended up in that plane, instead of an F-14, because he was too big for that plane.

Pointing out that George Raft (ex-con), Jimmy Cagney. and Mark Wahlberg were real tough guys before their film careers.

A couple of the other short guys were gifted athletes. Past the great dancer category - Alan Ladd, Gene Kelly sort (and Cagney who was a tough guy who danced) - you got the Stallone/Stiller gym rat sort, then Paul Newman....Newman grew up not thinking he was an athlete - he was slight and interested in theater and rejected for pilot school because of color blindness - then training for Rocky (Graziano, the movie that Stallone updated), discovered he was one on 50,000 in terms of hand-eye coordination and a "natural".

Newman raced with the pros, and set certain records for drivers of any age since erased, and still holds records for oldest driver to win and oldest driver to compete and place in 500 mile enduro.

As for Charlize Theron - no, she doesn't have bad skin w/o makeup. (As I see it).I believe that story started when they APPLIED makeup to make her look like she had bad skin in "Monster". Theron was a model before she started acting, a Cover Girl after some film hits..and her early flicks showed LOTS of skin.

Hayden - I think the height limitfor the guys on your Navy side flying F-14s was 6' 2" and some fraction. No one else flew them, so I don't know for sure. Something I'll probably check out of curiosity.

Many people think that film actors are generally stupid or that anyone could do their jobs. Ha. Competition is outlandishly fierce, and the best actors are almost always highly intelligent. I have a lot of respect for people who master that craft. They allow so many great stories to be told.

I think SJP is pushing 50...but if you look at her earlier films, she had one nice hard bod and would easily pass the "keeper" test.

Another big-schnozzed one that had a smoking bod and an ability to amp up the heat was Barbara Streisand. I thought my uncle was crazy when he said he thought Babs was a hottie. Then I saw her earlier movies..

It seems that most of the examples here are of women that a lot of people find attractive that the particular commenter doesn't (though I think SJP has quite a few people taking either side). I don't find Julia Roberts attractive, but I know that's not a consensus opinion.

I don't care for Streisand's face or her voice. When I'm playing fill-in-the-blank with "a blank accent is beautiful," I don't think "Brooklyn". Again, I know some people are willing to pay large amounts of money to hear her sing. I acknowledge that. I just don't understand it.